Prodea Systems raises $100 million for its Residential Operating System

Imagine a system that unlocks the doors and turns on the lights when your adolescent son arrives home and doesn’t allow him to watch anything on the TV until after he watches an educational video and notifies you at your office when he’s completed it. A well-funded and pedigreed startup company hopes to bring such a smart-home vision closer to reality. Texas-based Prodea on Tuesday is set to announce that it’s now offering technology it calls the “Residential Operating System” here in the United States. 

There are plenty of startups launching products aimed at connecting devices, but the Ansaris, a team of two brothers and one of their wives, have been working on the challenge of connecting different devices for the last eight years. The Ansaris built a telecoms startup that sold for $1.2 billion in 2000 and then later funded the Ansari XPrize for space exploration in 2004. They also built Prodea Systems, a company that now has seven service provider customers using its Residential Operating System to connect disparate devices and services in the home into a unified offering that ISPs or big consumer brands can manage and sell. I spoke at length with Prodea CTO Amir Ansari on the Internet of Things podcast this week, so click here to learn more. With a former astronaut as one of the founders, the software has the singular advantage of having been used on the International Space Station, allowing co-founder Anousheh Ansari to remotely control devices back on earth.